The Mark of the Assassin

by Daniel Silva

“What is it?”

  He looked up at her.

  “It’s the CIA case file on a KGB assassin code-named October.”

  38

  THE U.S.-CANADIAN BORDER

  Delaroche waited for first light. He had found a secluded spot in the woods, well off the highway south of Montreal, about three miles from the border. Astrid slept next to him in the back of the Range Rover beneath a heavy woolen blanket, body hunched against the cold. She had begged Delaroche to run the heater from time to time, but he refused because he wanted silence. He touched her hands as she slept. They were like ice.

  At six-thirty he rose, poured coffee from a thermos flask, and made a large bowl of oatmeal. Astrid came out ten minutes later, swaddled in a down parka and fleece hat. “Give me some of that coffee, Jean-Paul,” she said, taking the oatmeal and finishing the rest.

  Delaroche placed their supplies into a pair of small backpacks. He gave the lighter one to Astrid and shouldered the other himself. He placed the Beretta in the front waistband of his trousers. He quickly went through the vehicle from end to end to make certain they had left nothing that might identify them. The Range Rover would be left behind; another was supposed to be waiting on the American side of the border.

  They walked for an hour through the mountain ridges above Lake Champlain. They could have made the crossing by staying to the frozen lakeshore, but Delaroche deemed it too exposed. Two pairs of snowshoes had been left in the Range Rover, but Delaroche thought it was best to use only hiking boots since the ground lay beneath only a few inches of hard frozen snow. Astrid struggled up and down the hillsides and through the dense trees. She was slightly awkward and ungainly in the best of circumstances; her long body was thoroughly unsuited to the rigors of winter mountain hiking. Once, she slipped down a hillside and came to rest flat on her back with her legs propped against a tree.

  Delaroche was not certain exactly when they left Canada and entered the United States. There was no border demarcation, no fence, no visible electronic surveillance of any kind. His employers had selected the spot well. Delaroche remembered a night a long time ago, when as a young boy he had crossed into the West from Czechoslovakia to Austria accompanied by two KGB agents. He remembered the warm night, arc lights and razor wire, the thick scent of manure on the air. He remembered raising his gun and shooting his escorts. Even now, walking through the freezing Vermont morning, he closed his eyes at the thought of it, his first assassinations.

  He had been acting on orders from Vladimir. To describe Vladimir as his case officer would be an understatement. Vladimir was his world. Vladimir was everything to Delaroche—his teacher, his priest, his tormentor, his father. He taught him to read and to write. He taught him language and history. He taught him tradecraft and killing. When it was time to go to the West, Vladimir handed Delaroche to Arbatov the way a parent entrusts a child to a relative. Vladimir’s last order was to kill the escorts. The act instilled something very important in Delaroche: He would never trust anyone, especially someone from his own service. When he was older he realized that was exactly what Vladimir had intended.

  The terrain softened as they came down from the ridge. Delaroche, using the map and a compass, guided them to the outskirts of a village called Highgate Springs, two miles south of the border. The second Range Rover was waiting for them, parked in a stand of pine bordering a snow-covered cornfield. Delaroche placed the gear in the back, and they climbed inside. This time the engine started on the first try.

  Delaroche drove carefully along the icy two-lane road. Astrid, exhausted from the hike, immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Forty minutes later Delaroche came to Interstate 89 and headed south.

  39

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Why would Adrian lie to you about the existence of October?”

  Elizabeth’s question sounded strange to Michael. It was like a child asking about sex for the first time. Their new openness was alien to him, and he felt awkward discussing agency matters candidly with his wife. Still, he did enjoy it. Elizabeth, with her lawyer’s intellect and secretive nature, would have made a good intelligence officer if she had not chosen the law.

  “All intelligence services run on the concept of need to know. The argument could be made that I had no need to know about October’s existence, and therefore I was never told of it.”

  “But, Michael, he murdered Sarah in front of your eyes. If anyone should be allowed to see what the Agency had on him, it’s you.”

  “Good point, but information is kept from intelligence officers all the time for all kinds of different reasons.”

  “The Soviet Union has been dead and buried for ages. Why would his file still be so restricted?”

  “We give up our dead slowly in the intelligence community, Elizabeth. There’s nothing an intelligence service likes more than a good pile of useless secrets.”

  “Maybe someone wanted it restricted.”

  “I’ve considered that possibility.”

  Michael stopped in front of the Washington Post building on 15th Street. Tom Logan, Susanna Dayton’s editor, had asked to meet with Elizabeth. Michael had planned to wait in the car but now said, “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Not at all, but we have to hurry. We’re late.”

  “Where are you supposed to meet him?”

  “In his office. Why?”

  “I’m just not crazy about enclosed places, that’s all.”

  “Michael, this isn’t East Berlin. Cut it out.”

  But Michael had already snatched the cell phone from its cradle. “What’s his extension?”

  “Fifty-six eighty-four.”

  The telephone rang, and Logan’s secretary answered. “This is Michael Osbourne. May I speak to Mr. Logan, please.”

  Logan came on the line and said, “Hello, Mike.”

  “Elizabeth and I are downstairs. Mind if we change the venue?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’re on Fifteenth Street, silver Jaguar.”

  “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

  Michael snapped the handset back into place. Elizabeth said, “What’s the problem?”

  “You know that feeling you get when someone’s looking at you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I have it right now. I can’t find him, but I know he’s out there.” Michael stared into the rearview mirror for a moment. “I have good instincts,” he said distantly, “and I always trust my instincts.”

  Five minutes later Logan walked out the front door of the Post building. Logan was tall and bald, and the wind was playing havoc with his fringe of overgrown graying hair. He wore no overcoat, just a crimson scarf wrapped around his thin neck, and his hands were jammed in the pockets of wrinkled gray flannels. Osbourne reached back and threw open the rear door. Logan climbed in and said, “God, I love the weather in this town. Seventy degrees yesterday and forty today.”

  Michael pressed down hard on the accelerator, and the Jaguar leaped from the curb into the heavy traffic of downtown Washington. Logan buckled his seat belt and clutched the armrest.

  “What do you do for a living, Mike?”

  “I sell computer equipment to large clients overseas.”

  “Ah, sounds interesting.”

  Michael turned left on M Street and sped west across downtown. He turned right on New Hampshire, raced around Dupont Circle, and accelerated west along Massachusetts Avenue. He expertly weaved in and out of traffic and spent more time looking in his rearview mirror than at the road ahead of him.

  Logan had by now nearly torn the armrest from the rear door. “I didn’t catch the name of the company you work for, Mike.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell you. And I prefer Michael, Tom.”

  Elizabeth turned around and took a long look over her shoulder. “Anything?” she asked.

  “If anyone was there, they’re gone now.”

  He slowed down and fell into pace with the rest of the traffic. Logan let go of the arm
rest and relaxed.

  “Computer salesman, my ass,” he said.

  Henry Rodriguez had been assigned to watch Elizabeth Osbourne that day, but he broke off the chase along M Street. Michael Osbourne, a former field officer, was trained to recognize sophisticated physical surveillance. One person crudely disguised as a Chinese food delivery-man could be spotted in a matter of minutes. He pulled to the curb and telephoned Mark Calahan at the command post in Kalorama.

  “He was definitely trying to shake a tail,” Rodriguez said. “If I tried to hang with him, he would have made me.”

  “Good call. Go back to Georgetown. Wait for them to show.”

  Calahan walked into the library to break the news to Mitchell Elliott.

  “Logan must need help,” Elliott said. “Why else would he be meeting with her now?”

  “She’s in a position to do serious damage. Perhaps we should tighten things up a bit.”

  “I agree,” Elliott said. “I think it’s time Henry went back to work.”

  “He’s not going to like being a janitor again. He feels we’re discriminating against him because of his Hispanic heritage.”

  “If he doesn’t like it, let him file a complaint with the EEOC. I pay him well to do what he’s told.”

  Calahan smiled. “Yes, sir, Mr. Elliott.”

  Michael found a parking spot on East Capitol Street. He dug an old windbreaker from the trunk for Tom Logan, and they walked in Lincoln Park beneath cold, slate gray skies.

  Logan said, “How much of Susanna’s original material did you read?”

  “Enough to get the picture,” Elizabeth said.

  “Let me refresh your memory,” Logan said. “In the early eighties, Beckwith wanted out of politics. More specifically, Anne Beckwith wanted out of politics. She wanted her husband back in the private sector, where he could earn some serious money before he was too old. Both of them had a little family money, but not much. Anne likes nice things. She wanted more than what they could get on a government paycheck. He’d done two terms in the Senate, and she told him it was politics or her.”

  A pair of joggers approached them from behind, each with a dog straining at the end of a leash. Logan, like a good field man, waited for them to pass out of earshot before resuming.

  “Beckwith is a lot of things, but he’s totally devoted to Anne, and the last thing he wanted was to lose her. But he also enjoyed politics and wasn’t particularly thrilled about practicing law again. He called his advisers and money boys together in San Francisco one night and broke the news. Needless to say, Mitchell Elliott was apoplectic. He’d invested a lot of time and money in Beckwith over the years, and he didn’t want that investment to go to waste. He telephoned Anne the next morning and asked to meet privately with her. That night over dinner, Anne took it all back and encouraged Beckwith to run for governor. He won, of course, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Michael said, “What happened in that meeting between Anne Beckwith and Mitchell Elliott?”

  “Elliott assured Anne that if her husband remained in politics, they both would be well cared for financially. The first stage was simple stuff, and in the overall scheme of things it was chump change. Elliott got his powerful friends in the business community to place Anne on more than a dozen boards of directors. She earned money as a consultant, even though she had almost no business experience. She also invested very wisely, with help from Elliott, we suspect, and she made a killing in the financial markets.

  “Within three years, Anne had a substantial war chest, a few million dollars. She took almost all of that money and bought several hundred acres of what was then worthless desert south of San Diego. Two years later a developer announced plans to build a new community of condominiums, single family homes, and a strip mall right on Anne’s land. Suddenly, her worthless land was worth a great deal of money.”

  “Mitchell Elliott was behind it all?” Elizabeth asked.

  “We think so, but we can’t prove it, and therefore we can’t print it. Elliott needed help to devise all these schemes. He had big plans for Beckwith, and he didn’t want him tarnished by scandal. He needed someone who understood Washington and, more importantly, understood how to circumvent campaign finance laws. He turned to a high-powered Washington lawyer.”

  “Samuel Braxton,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s right,” Logan said. “And finally, after years of waiting, Elliott’s investment paid off big this year. The national missile defense was dead in the water. But twenty-four hours after Flight Double-oh-two went down, Elliott was inside the White House for a meeting with Beckwith. Susanna saw it. She also saw Elliott and Vandenberg together later that same night. The next evening Beckwith goes before the nation, announces strikes against the Sword of Gaza, and proposes building a national missile defense. Capitol Hill is suddenly all for missile defense. Andrew Sterling is pinned to the wall because he’s on record against it. Beckwith pulls out the election, and Elliott’s Alatron Defense Systems is in line to earn several billion dollars.”

  “So why haven’t you gone with Susanna’s story?” Michael asked.

  “Like I told your wife before, on a story like this we go over every fact, every quote, every piece of information, with the reporter before publication. In this case, the reporter is dead, and we had to start over, using her original copy as a road map. We’ve got most of it, but we’re missing a very important piece of the puzzle. Somehow, Susanna got hold of original financial and real estate documents. We suspect she had a source inside Braxton, Allworth & Kettlemen who gave her the documents. We’ve been through Susanna’s files, and we can’t find them. We’ve tried to find our own source inside the firm, but we haven’t been successful.”

  Logan shivered and tied his scarf more tightly around his neck. “Elizabeth, obviously you can answer this question any way you see fit, but I have to ask it. Were you the source for those documents?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said quickly. “Susanna asked me, and I told her I wouldn’t do it. I told her it was unethical, and if it ever became known that I leaked the documents my career would be destroyed.”

  Logan hesitated a moment, then said, “Will you do it now?”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Elizabeth, Samuel Braxton is a dishonest lawyer and criminal who’s about to be rewarded by being made secretary of state. I don’t know about you, but that pisses me off, and as a journalist I’d like to do something about it. But I can’t, not without your help. Now, if you’re concerned about whether you’ll be protected, I assure you we will do nothing that will endanger you in any way. You can trust me.”

  “Tom, I’ve lived in Washington most of my life, and there’s one thing I’ve learned. You can’t trust anyone in this town.”

  Logan stopped walking and turned to face Michael. “You don’t work for a computer company that sells to overseas buyers. You work in the Counterterrorism Center at the Central Intelligence Agency. You were the hero in that attack at Heathrow Airport, and you were involved in the bombing on that Channel ferry. I know you may find this hard to believe, Michael, but even people in your outfit like to talk to reporters. We didn’t publish the information, because we didn’t want to place you in any danger.”

  Logan turned and looked at Elizabeth.

  “I won’t do anything that will get you hurt. You can trust me, Elizabeth.”

  40

  BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  Delaroche became nervous for the first time when he left Interstate 95 and headed onto the Capital Beltway. He had driven some of the most demanding roads of Europe—winding highways in France and Italy, deadly mountain roads in the Alps and the Pyrenees—but nothing had prepared him for the madness of the Washington evening rush hour.

  The trip from Vermont had gone smoothly. The weather had been good, except for a brief snowstorm in upstate New York and a patch of freezing drizzle along the New Jersey Turnpike. The temperatures warmed the farther south they traveled, and the rain had ended
at Philadelphia. Now it was the other drivers Delaroche feared most. Cars were roaring by him at eighty-five miles per hour—thirty miles above the speed limit—and the truck behind him was riding six feet from his bumper.

  Delaroche thought how easy it would be to have a collision under circumstances like these. The results would be disastrous. Because he was a foreigner the police would want to see his passport. If the officer was alert and knew anything about passports, he would notice that Delaroche’s bore no entrance visa. He would probably be taken into custody and questioned by immigration authorities and the FBI. His identity would crumble and he would be arrested, all because of some nut trying to get home from work.

  The cars in front of him braked suddenly. The traffic came to a standstill. Delaroche found an all-news station on the radio and listened to the traffic update. Somewhere ahead of him a tractor-trailer rig had overturned. Traffic was snarled for miles.

  Delaroche thought of his home in Brélés. He thought of the sea smashing against the rocks and of pedaling his Italian racing bike along the quiet back roads of the Finistère. He must have been daydreaming, because the man in the car behind him blared his horn and waved his arms frantically. The driver changed lanes, pulled alongside Delaroche, and made a vulgar gesture with his hand. “Please, Jean-Paul,” Astrid said. “Let me get my gun from the back and shoot him.”

  Thirty minutes later they approached the scene of the accident. A Maryland state trooper stood in the roadway, directing traffic around the overturned truck. Delaroche tensed reflexively in the presence of a police officer. The fire trucks and ambulances disappeared behind them, and the traffic began moving again. Delaroche exited at Wisconsin Avenue and headed south.

  He sped through downtown Bethesda, past the exclusive shops of the Mazza Galleria, the towering spires of the National Cathedral. Wisconsin Avenue fell away into Georgetown. Shoppers moved quickly through the cold evening air, and the bars and restaurants were beginning to fill. He turned left at M Street, drove a few blocks, and turned into the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel.